INTEGRATED WATER RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: Actors and Rules Negotiating Water Management in Indian Himalayas

World wide integrated water resource management (IWRM) has gained prominence as a community-based approach for poverty alleviation and environmental management. However, its practical application, its precise meaning and its implication for policy practice has come under increased scrutiny. The thesis makes a proposition that the best way to understand IWRM in practice was to examine the interactive nature of actors and rules influencing water resource management. This proposition is examined to a core water-related issue applicable in four socioeconomically and hydrologically distinct hamlets from two watersheds in India. The thesis draws on new institutionalism from social sciences to evolve an analytical framework that was empirically applied using diverse research methods to unravel the complex interaction. The information (qualitative and quantitative) collected was collapsed in the Bayesian Belief Network model to identify the actors and rules, understand their influence network, and to determine the probability of decisions influencing water management. The study reveals a notable trend on the role of actors and rules in the comparative watersheds. In Khairi-Ka-Kala watershed that was well connected and located in lower hills, statutory actors play a prominent role in providing boundary, position and authority rules for policy making and water allocation. In contrast, in the remote Rajana watershed it was the socially embedded actors. Interestingly, the households capabilities were influenced by socially embedded actors that enabled them to access water in both the watersheds. The differential capabilities enabled households to evolve diverse actions that were facilitated by diverse agents of institutional change. Absence of information and scope rules was a major constraining factor for actors towards making informed water related decisions. The study reveals the role of diverse actors and rules negotiating water at various levels in space and time in the watersheds. In this contested regime, the thesis calls for building better infrastructure facilities to facilitate communication among actors, to monitor and evaluate water resource programmes by sectoral actors, facilitate endowments of actors for managing water and to remain adaptive to the diverse roles of agents for institutional innovation. This provides an enabling institutional environment for actors to exercise and negotiate their differential rules to manage water. The thesis concludes by drawing implications for water management, institutional analysis and by identifying area for future research to understand water resources management